[ih] Larry Roberts & RD the first electronic mail manager software [was written in TECO on TENEX]

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

interesting that you mention teleconferencing and Case (CASE-10 PDP-10
Tenex), John... as Jim Calvin (also from Case and then to BBN) wrote IIRC
his degree thesis on a teleconferencing client(TALK) and server (TELSER)
that operated from multiple client hosts... i.e. we all didn't have to be
logged into the same system to chat.

when Jim graduated from Case yours truly ran a copy of it on SRI-AI to try
to help facilitate what was known at the time as The Friday Night Forum...
where a bunch of us would congregate on a host such as MIT-AI or SU-AI that
could support more than 5 users LINKed together on Tenex.

each person would use their login name, initials or some other unique
abbreviation to indicate who grabbed the floor first... and when one was
done with their input, you would end with a double return.

ah, those were the days... :D

g

On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 11:11 AM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> In 1972 maybe late 71, (I think it was Ross Callon from Case, a recent BBN
> hire) used the LINK command to create the first teleconferencing program.
> At least that is what we called it then. It was more like the Instant
> Messaging programs of latter. It was a bit of a kludge, because it couldn’t
> keep different messages separate. ;-) Just like when two people used the
> LINK command. ;-)
>
> Remember Tenex was character-at-a-time. So if someone said something and
> more than one person started to respond, it would interleave their
> responses character by character as it received them! ;-) So we had to work
> out who had the floor ourselves. ;-) But even so we had some lively
> discussions in the evenings, in fact most every evening, and were
> collaborating on how to do an application like that better and other
> software ideas. I don’t remember who all else was involved except John
> Iseli who started the ARPANET NEWS.
>
> My recollection is that that there was a paper or two at ICCC’72 on this
> form of teleconferencing, but I am not sure it used this application.
>
> About the same time, I did some figuring on how eventually one could put
> academic journals on line. The impetus was that in the biological sciences,
> they couldn’t publish many photos from electron microscopes because they
> had to be high resolution and it was expensive. So they had to be very
> selective in what the published. It was obvious that once it could be
> online, they could publish as many photos as they wanted. I did a little
> background digging into it as to what it would require.  I think one of our
> people wrote a paper on that too.
>
> I might even have some transcripts from our sessions some place if they
> are still readable (They are on that heat-sensitive paper from Silent700s).
> If I don’t have them CBI does.
>
> Take care,
> John
>
> > On Aug 8, 2023, at 12:52, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > that was a really excellent "little bit" steve... if yours truly may add
> a
> > little bit more to "I'm interrupted by a chat request from Lukasik"
> > vis-a-vis the "chat request":
> >
> > that was known as the LINK command in the Tenex EXEC, where you could say
> > LINK USERNAME or link TTY# and your terminal session and the other
> person's
> > terminal session would be summarily LINKED to each other -- where each
> > would see exactly what the other was seeing... IIRC up to 5 terminals
> could
> > be LINKED together... ERGO, after Lukasik LINKED to you, he likely just
> > typed out the memo file on his terminal which of course came out on
> yours.
> >
> > when terminals were linked to one another, we would proceed our text with
> > an ";" -- which was the EXEC's "comment" character, i.e.
> > @; hi there
> > @; what's up?
> > [...]
> > with the occasional "flub" of where one would forget to proceed their
> > comment with the ";" and the EXEC would then interpret it as commands...
> > with sometimes "unusual" results... later, a program named TALK was
> written
> > what just took what was typed into it and did nothing with it... although
> > it did have a nice feature in that you could type stuff in without
> RETURNs
> > and it would automatically insert line breaks (CR's) after 60 some odd
> > characters or so... recalling that in those days we mostly had Teletype
> > Model 33 ASR's (or KSR's) that were only upper case and had a line length
> > of 72 characters (and printed out at 110 baud, or 10 characters per
> second
> > CPS)
> >
> > one last thing about LINKing on Tenex: if you were a WHEEL (I.e.
> > privileged user) it was possible to do one-way LINKS -- i.e. SPY on a
> > terminal or user... this was most useful for monitoring the CTY and/or
> TTY0
> > which is where the monitor (or system daemon's/sysjob's) would spit out
> > "issues".
> >
> > geoff
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 9:24 AM Steve Crocker <steve at shinkuro.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Adding a little bit to your summary:
> >>
> >> I was in (D)ARPA/IPTO from mid 1971 to mid 1974.  When I arrived, the
> >> Arpanet had been in operation for almost two years.  IPTO consisted of
> the
> >> director (Larry Roberts), three program managers (Bruce Dolan, John
> Perry,
> >> me), a senior non-technical person who handled our budgets and
> >> related matters (Al Blue), and two secretaries.  Steve Lukasik was the
> >> (D)ARPA director and hence Larry's boss.  I write (D)ARPA here because
> the
> >> agency was christened the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and
> >> embedded within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in 1958.
> On 1
> >> July 1972 it was moved out of OSD and became a separate Defense
> Agency.  In
> >> the process, it acquitted the initial D, i.e. Defense Advanced Research
> >> Projects Agency, hence DARPA.  The transition made essentially no
> >> difference in our mission or operation.
> >>
> >> A short time later, we had a TIP installed in the office.  This meant we
> >> could connect  a large number of terminals.  Everyone in our office had
> a
> >> terminal on the desk, and soon others through the agency had terminals
> >> too.  Lukasik was a strong proponent and soon required that each of his
> >> direct reports, i.e. the directors of the other Offices, use email to
> >> communicate with him. Each of us was also given an account on the Tenex
> >> machine at the new USC Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI).
> >>
> >> Lukasik used email to transform the way he conducted business.  Even
> >> though we were all housed in the same office building -- 1400 Wilson
> Blvd,
> >> Arlington, VA, where a plaque now stands commemorating the creation of
> the
> >> Arpanet -- and could meet face to face easily, he found email made it
> >> possible for him to reorganize his time and attention.  (More on this
> >> below.)
> >>
> >> The earliest made reader we had was RD.  I believe Roberts wrote.  He
> was
> >> a very competent TECO hacker, and he whipped it up quickly.  In that
> >> version, mail was stored in a continuous file.  In some later mail
> systems,
> >> each message was in a separate file, but at the beginning all of a
> user's
> >> mail was in a continuous file.  These files grew fairly quickly.
> Moving to
> >> a particular message became a slow process.
> >>
> >> I too was a fairly competent TECO hacker.  I took a look and realized
> why
> >> it was taking too long to find a message.  In the file, each message was
> >> preceded by a line that had a string indicating it was the beginning of
> a
> >> message and a count of the number of characters in the message.  In
> >> principle, that should have made it quick to move forward in the file
> from
> >> one message to the next.  However, that count didn't coincide with the
> >> actual number of characters in the file.  When the count was created, it
> >> treated the end of each line as one character, the newline character
> (NL),
> >> but when the message arrived, it became two characters, carriage return
> >> (CR) followed by line feed (LF).  Hence the TECO code had a loop that
> moved
> >> forward one character at a time until it found the beginning of the next
> >> message.  Very slow.  (I might be misremembering and reversing these
> >> effects, but either way it was the discrepancy between the way ends of
> >> lines were demarcated at the point of creation and the the way ends of
> >> lines were demarcated on the receiving side.)
> >>
> >> I replaced that loop with code that skipped forward a line at a time and
> >> then adjusted the number of characters it still had to go.  The speedup
> was
> >> dramatic.
> >>
> >> Above I alluded to changes in Lukasik's management style.  My primary
> >> focus while I was at (D)ARPA was the AI portfolio, i.e., MIT, CMU,
> >> Stanford, SRI and BN and others.  AI was unquestionably a long term bet.
> >> (D)ARPA's usual profile was heavy funding of some area for five years
> or so
> >> to trigger a large change.  ("A factor of ten, not ten percent" was the
> >> common catchphrase.). We knew AI was a *much* longer trek.  Fifty years,
> >> most likely.  That meant it was a constant challenge to protect the
> funding
> >> and explain the research to Congress.
> >>
> >> In the UK, Science Research Council, the UK counterpart to the US NSF,
> had
> >> been funding Donald Michie's AI research at the University of Edinburgh.
> >> According to a 29 June 1973 news article in Science, "In early 1972 Sir
> >> James Lighthill of Cambridge University undertook to survey the field of
> >> artificial intelligence (AI) for the Science Research Council of
> Britain."
> >> His report was dismissive of AI and had a strongly negative influence
> on AI
> >> funding in the UK.  Toward the end of the Science news article, the
> >> following was embedded:
> >>
> >> Even granting that AI is an intellectually important area for research,
> it
> >> is fair to ask whether the field is using its resources wisely. The
> >> Lighthill report suggests that, in the United States especially, little
> >> attention has been given to this question, in part because there has
> been a
> >> relatively assured source of funding.  As is true for computer science
> in
> >> general, research on AI is pre-dominantly supported by the Defense
> >> Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which provides about $4.5
> million
> >> a year.
> >>
> >> 29 July 1973 was a Friday.  That evening I was sitting at my terminal at
> >> home.  Abruptly, I'm interrupted by a chat request from Lukasik.  I had
> no
> >> idea he even knew how to do that.  After we were connected, he asked if
> he
> >> printed something on his terminal, would I see it?  I assured him I
> would.
> >> Immediately a ten point memo starts printing on my terminal.  He's
> >> concerned that Congress might see this comment in Science and take aim
> at
> >> our AI program.  His memo dealt with possible press or Congressional
> >> questions, coordination internally, etc.  I understood completely he
> >> perceived a possible threat and was making sure we were manning the
> >> ramparts.  Fortunately, the attack never came.  Even so, we did have a
> >> session in the office on a Sunday afternoon later in the summer
> watching a
> >> taped copy of the debate between McCarthy and Lighthill.
> >>
> >> AI wars aside, the relevance to this thread is how quickly and
> effectively
> >> Lukasik absorbed the new technology and put it to use.
> >>
> >> Steve
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 8:48 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> >> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> "... In 1969 Roberts became director of the Information Processing
> >>> Techniques Office at ARPA. In 1971 he wrote one of the first e-mail
> >>> programs, RD, which for the first time allowed users to save, delete,
> and
> >>> organize their messages....
> >>> so sez:
> >>> https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lawrence-Roberts
> >>>
> >>> while
> >>>
> >>>
> https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1999-00/internet/email.html
> >>> sez:
> >>>
> >>> ...The Rise of Email by way of Convenient Mail-Managers
> >>>
> >>> Stephen Lukasik, one of ARPA's directors from 1971-75 might be one of
> the
> >>> most important advocates of email in its young age. He strongly
> encouraged
> >>> his staff to use email. It was even considered the most effective way
> to
> >>> reach Lukasik. Close friends and colleagues with Larry Roberts, Lukasik
> >>> confided to Roberts in 1973 that he was beginning to face problems
> >>> organizing the chaotic pile of messages received each day. (At this
> point,
> >>> in a study conducted by ARPA under Lukasik's direction discovered that
> 75%
> >>> of all ARPANET traffic was in the form of email.) Not to mention,
> reading
> >>> and responding to the messages was, as of yet not a simple matter. In
> >>> response, Roberts wrote the first "mail-manager software," RD. Its
> >>> functions included displaying a menu of messages and allowing the user
> to
> >>> file messages and delete messages. This inspired an outburst of
> variations
> >>> on the mail manager. A legendary variation, MSG was created in 1975 by
> >>> John
> >>> Vittal. MSG quickly became the most widely used mail-management program
> >>> due
> >>> to its convenient features. It could handle an even greater amount of
> mail
> >>> than RD, could sort messages into separate files, and most importantly,
> >>> reply and forward with much greater ease. MSG also spawned a large
> amount
> >>> of variations...
> >>>
> >>> [any others?]
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> >>> living as The Truth is True
> >>> --
> >>> Internet-history mailing list
> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>>
> >>
> >
> > --
> > Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> > living as The Truth is True
> > --
> > Internet-history mailing list
> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True